Skip to content
Skip to navigation menu

Wellbeing, Health & Mental Health

The School's interests in wellbeing, health and mental health are broad-ranging. Our health research examines psychosocial influences on reproductive health, health factors affecting human performance and mood, delusions, and health-related behaviours.

Research on mental health examines the psychological and neural underpinnings of a wide range of human mental disorders including antisocial behaviour and psychopathy, addiction, delusions, depression, ADHD, autism, Altzheimer's disease, and schizophrenia. The research is multidisciplinary, involving experimental neuropsychopathology, complemented by work at the CUBRIC. There are strong links with forensic psychology and cognitive neuropsychiatry, and active collaborations with researchers in the MRC Centre in Neuropsychiatric Genetics and Genomics in Cardiff.

Our research is organised into four themes:

Health & Wellbeing

  • What are the key features of the wellbeing process, how does one measure them, and what are the implications of the process for policy and practice?
  • What are the determinants for fertility and child bearing?

Autism

  • What are the distinguishing characteristics of autism?
  • Does autism change with age and intervention?

Antisociality

  • What are the individual neurobiological and psychosocial factors that explain variation in children’s risk for antisocial behavior?
  • Risk assessment of violence to others and to the self: Psychopathy, personality disorder and psychosis.

Delusions, Obsessions and Compulsions

  • What are the neural and cognitive mechanisms underpinning belief formation?
  • Do we control our desires or do they control us?
  • How are neural mechanisms of reward and punishment altered in Mood Disorders and impulsive-compulsive spectrum disorders and how does this affect decision-making in these disorders?